A healthy democracy has a zero tolerance policy when it comes to censors.

As I pledged on Spectator TV last week, One Nation will always – without the need for advice, advisers, or experts – defend the right of Australians to speak freely.

This is a position I have defended for my entire career.

Free speech is exactly that, a right, not an optional extra to be decided at the whim of government and the bureaucracy.

The only reason free speech is not enshrined in our Constitution, as it is for America, is because our founding fathers did not believe – for a single moment – that Australian politicians would be foolish enough or selfish enough to reach their hands over the mouths of citizens.

Censorship of the news and the silencing of citizens would repulse our forebears.

One Nation pledges that #FreedomOfSpeech is fundamental to humanity.

"The power in a democracy resides with the people.

Politicians in Parliament are there to represent the will of the people.

Democracy is about everyone's VOICE having an opportunity to be heard in… pic.twitter.com/LsiqrcBhsi

— Alexandra Marshall (@ellymelly) April 29, 2024

One Nation does not believe in Nanny State busybodies peering over people’s shoulder, huffing and puffing at the fragile scaffolding of democracy.

These bureaucracies who claimed to ‘keep us safe’ are making Australia more dangerous as a result of suppressing truth and allowing propaganda to flourish.

Those awarded the power to censor have found themselves incapable of sticking to their legislated position. Far from focusing on child safety, as is her role, the e-Safety Commissioner has decided that her office will be the gate keeper of global news. Her ambitions are not only ludicrous, they are an affront to decency, common sense, and humanity.

She is not alone. The UK equivalent sold itself to an equally sceptical public on the promise of ‘keeping the kiddies safe’ and yet has almost exclusively pursued the protection of progressive political ideas – including those that harm children.

We need to stop allowing governments to use children as the excuse for censorship.

How pathetic that we have a government that lectures the world about democracy while enacting a terrifying veneer of totalitarian policy domestically. Mr Albanese and Mr Dutton are frightened that the ghouls of their mistakes will be writ large across social media.

The public’s tweets are embedded in their political reputations like shrapnel from the great battle of ideas. The leaders of our political monopoly limp away from the debate when they’d do better to crawl and beg the forgiveness of the taxpayer.

This is where Mr Dutton surrendered the leadership to Labor. He has been stumbling along the pavement of good intentions for years, tripping over his self-made gaffes, dusting himself down, and stumbling again. On this occasion he has chosen to stay in the dirt and advance legislation that robs Australians of their freedom of speech.

Only a gutless politician cowers behind censorship. Only a political failure fears the whispers of his critics. Only the mortally wounded regime closes its doors, battens down the hatches, and starts printing the concocted ‘truth’ with the same reckless abandon as the Treasury prints cash.

It is not Australia’s role, and especially not the purview of the e-Stasi Commissar, to prune global news into something inoffensive and ‘safe’ for Australians to view. Censoring is lying through omission. It is creating a false narrative. It is fabricating misinformation and disinformation, hiding from view the full story … the full truth.

Let us not forget that the tiny spiders building the web of censorship are faceless, nameless, unaccountable ‘fact checkers’ whose work, up to this point, has been inaccurate, politically biased, and wrong. How often have you clicked on a ‘fact check’ that labels information as ‘false’ only to find it described as ‘misleading’ because it ‘lacks context’? These fact-checkers routinely admit that something they have labelled ‘false’ is actually ‘true’ – it’s just true in a way the government doesn’t like. Manipulating public perception of truth in this way is another form of misinformation that operates in a similar fashion to a character assassination designed to discredit a person’s work.

Australia has never asked the government to turn the digital world into a ‘safe space’ padded cell hemmed in by algorithmic barbed wire.

Mr Albanese did not print this promise on his election posters – and nor would he dare. The policies of this government, often drafted in the Morrison-era, have been kept in the shadows and then rushed through into law – smuggled under a blanket of secrecy so that the public cannot view the full extent of their hideous appearance.

Nothing good ever came from a government authority figure taking off their gloves and back-handing the public across the face with them. Barking ‘shut up!’ orders is a behaviour reserved for dangerous regimes and cowardly individuals who pretend a piece of duct tape will keep the peace.

To the e-Safety Commissioner, a spurned former Twitter employee who recently watched Elon Musk flush away the festering sewer of left-leaning community standards control freaks, I ask, ‘How peaceful do you imagine the public feels watching the news vanish as a result of your actions?’

‘If the [social media companies] fail to remove the content, then we can go to search engines such as Google and Bing to really minimise the amount of content the Australians can see,’ said e-Safety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant.

In a better, safer, and more honest time, a statement such as that would not only see the e-Safety Commissioner shamed out of her role, but the whole Albanese government packed up and evicted.

Nobody, not the Prime Minister, not myself or the other Senators, and certainly not some made-up role like ‘e-Safety Commissioner’ has the moral right to decide what Australians can read about our world. Deleting stories, hiding stories, and re-writing stories is a type of madness that denotes our descent into a political cult of safety.

To use the alleged terror attack against a Christian Bishop as an excuse to delete content is particularly egregious. Not only did the Bishop clearly state that he did not wish the attack on him to be used to silence the speech of Australians, the underlying assumption that the video itself incited the riots that followed is wrong.

In a tight-knit religious community, news of the stabbing spread like wildfire – with or without the internet. Those who took to the street did not do so because a video incited them, according to all accounts they did so because of the attack itself. If the government wants to keep the streets of Australia safe, it must do so by cracking down on terror cells. It could also try making arrests instead of giving dangerous people a gentle slap on the wrist.

The Albanese government knows that it is easier to criminalise the news rather than arrest criminals.

And so that is what they – and their counterparts in similarly besieged Western governments – are doing.

This behaviour does not keep people safe, it keeps them quiet. The outcome of this process is to endanger lives.

The e-Safety Commissioner’s demands are a dark stain spilling out of Australia’s servers which Twitter CEO Elon Musk must now find a way to wash out of the code for the good of everyone – especially for Australia.

Australians are in the situation where they must rely on a foreign billionaire’s charity to save free speech.